Question

I need to write an “object” to a file in C#, but all my attempts so far didn’t work. The problem is that the object I want to write really is of type object as it is returned from the Attachments collection of a MailItem object from an Outlook e-mail.

I already managed to insert it into a SQL Server database, retrieve and successfully create a correct file from it, but this can’t be the only way to go.

I also tried using BinaryFormatter as shown below, but this always corrupts my file header by adding some unwanted characters at the start (the remaining data seems to be okay):

[...]
using ( FileStream fileStream = new FileStream( tempName, FileMode.Create ) )
{
    using ( BinaryWriter binaryWriter = new BinaryWriter( fileStream ) )
    {
        using ( MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream() )
        {
            object attachmentData =                                     
                attachment.PropertyAccessor.GetProperty( PR_ATTACH_DATA_BIN );
            BinaryFormatter binaryFormatter = 
                new BinaryFormatter();
            binaryFormatter.Serialize( memoryStream, attachmentData );
            memoryStream.Seek( 0, SeekOrigin.Begin );
            binaryWriter.Write( memoryStream.ToArray() );
        }
    }
}
[...]

Any ideas? I cannot control what I get from Outlook, so the usual serialization approach doesn’t seem to be what I need here…

Answer 1

I think this is what you are looking for:

How to: Save attachments from outlook

if (newEmail.Attachments.Count > 0)
{
      for (int i = 1; i <= newEmail.Attachments.Count; i++)
      {
           newEmail.Attachments[i].SaveAsFile
                (@"C:\TestFileSave\" +
                newEmail.Attachments[i].FileName);
      }
}